


Fractures

by howelleheir



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action, Angst, Car Accidents, Car Chases, Denial, Gore, HYDRA Husbands, Homophobia, M/M, Medical Trauma, conversion therapy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-05-23 06:58:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6108727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howelleheir/pseuds/howelleheir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Gray Bravo. I’m on the Benton ramp with eyes on the target. Engaging TVI.”<br/>“Rollins, did you copy that?” Rumlow says as the van pulls onto the access road. “Fall back.”<br/>No answer.<br/>“Rollins, do you copy?!”<br/>“Gray Bravo. Target is - shit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”<br/>The sound of screeching tires and grinding metal through the comm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired to write this by reading about Callan Mulvey's 2003 car accident.

“Who has eyes on the fucking target? Contain him. Now.”

A STRIKE raid. Rumlow leans out the open window as he shouts the order into his comm, no longer concerned about drawing attention. If this target slipped between their fingers, they’d have bigger problems than a few rubberneckers.

“Got him,” Rollins’ voice cuts in on the comm. “Tan SUV, just pulled onto the southbound access to I-35. I’m in pursuit.”

“Gray Team headed into formation, sir,” says Vandenberg. “Flanking on the northwest and southeast.”

“Gold Team, get ahead of it and get stingers on the road,” Rumlow says, then turns to his men. “Alright, Black Team, get this place dressed and planted in case we have to go through channels. Red Team, with me. We’re going to tail Blue and Gray for backup. Drivers, keep your distance in case they have to use TVI. Move out.”

Rumlow follows Red Team out of the target’s house and down to the street where their vehicles are idling. Two unmarked cars, two vans, and one squad car, painted to look like the local police department’s. Grey Team had the other two unmarked cars, which meant that Rollins had taken the other squad car.

“Oh, what the fuck?” Rumlow hisses as he jumps into the front passenger side of one of the vans and jams the button on his comm. “Where’s your team, Rollins?”

The voice that answers, “Still on the perimeter, sir,” isn’t Rollins’. It’s Helms, his Lieutenant. “Commander Rollins ordered us to hold position in case the target doubled back.”

“Okay, forget the perimeter. Everybody but Black Team, head west and catch up with Gray Team and Rollins. Gray Team, Rollins, what’s the location on the target?”

“Gray Alpha. Still heading southwest on the access to I-35, sir. Flanking on Quintana, about to make the cuttoff at Benton.”

“Gray Bravo. I’m on the Benton ramp with eyes on the target. Engaging TVI.”

“Rollins, did you copy that?” Rumlow says as the van pulls onto the access road. “Fall back.”

No answer.

“Rollins, do you copy?!”

“Gray Bravo. Target is - shit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

The sound of screeching tires and grinding metal through the comm.

“Gray Bravo, report!” Rumlow shouts as Dulles accelerates. Up ahead, if he strains, he can see the wreckage past the Benton overpass. “Report, now!”

“Gray Bravo.” The voice is breathless and hesitant. “Collision. Commander Rollins struck the target. It’s bad, sir.”

And it is bad. That much becomes clearer the closer they get to the scene.

“Anderson! I need medical and extrication here now. I-35 at the Benton ramp. All teams, keep the roadway clear,” Rumlow says into his comm, trying to keep his voice steady.  _ Be a leader. Take charge. Never show weakness. _

He jumps out of the van before Dulles even comes to a complete stop, assessing the accident. The unmarked car is the least damaged. It’s pulled over to the side of the ramp, and Gates, the agent who’d been driving it, is sitting on the pavement, head in his hands. Three hundred feet down the road is the tan SUV, sideways, its passenger side and back end crumpled, windshield shattered. The target is draped over the hood. Dead. Most likely killed on impact. The third car, Rollins’, is the worst. It’s flipped over onto its hood in the middle of the road, and so crushed that it looks more like a ball of aluminum foil than a squad car. Two agents, the other members of Gray Bravo, are kneeling by what remains of the driver’s side door.

Rumlow breaks into a run.

“Is he alive?!” he bellows. The agents turn, pale faced, at his voice.

One of them, Tenet, nods and gets to her feet. “Yes, sir, but he’s…” She glances back toward the wreckage, swallowing hard. “He’s unconscious and his injuries are critical. If he has family, we need to call them now.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Rumlow says. “You two, clear out. I’ll stay with him until medical gets here.”

As the agents walk away, Rumlow steels himself for what he’s about to see, setting his jaw and taking a long, measured breath before sinking to one knee on the glass-littered pavement and shining his flashlight through the window of the car. Rollins is still strapped into the seat, slumped down with his head against the wheel, his breathing shallow and ragged. His face is a mess - a deep cut across the right side of his chin, his nose and cheekbones sunken, right eye swollen shut. His left eye opens weakly, fluttering and unfocused, and he lets out a low moan. 

“Hey,” Rumlow breathes, reaching in through the window to lay a hand on Rollins’ shoulder. “Hey, you with me? Don’t try to move. We’re gonna get you out of there, but not yet, okay? Extrication and medical are on the way.”

Rollins makes a noise that might be a laugh. “Idiot,” he manages to slur. “Not...gonna-”

“Shut the fuck up,” Rumlow snaps. Behind him, the ambulance pulls up, flooding the road with red, flashing light. “Look, there’s medical. They’ll take care of you. I gotta get out of the way.”

Rollins grabs weakly at Rumlow’s hand. “Don’t.”

“Not an option, man,” Rumlow says, his voice coming out higher than he’d intended. He squeezes Rollins’ hand. “Just hang on for me. I’ll see you when they get you out.”


	2. Chapter 2

 

As the medical team assesses Rollins and the extrication crew begins to set up lights and equipment, Rumlow walks into the grass, away from the noise of the highway, the crew, and the chattering agents, and pulls out his phone. Scrolls through the call-log to a number Rollins had borrowed his phone to dial back in December. He grits his teeth as it rings.

After seven rings, “Hello?” She sounds confused, like she just woke up. Of course she does; it’s two in the morning, three her time. Rumlow doesn’t find his voice before she repeats, “Hello?”

“Margaret,” he says, finally. “It’s Brock. I...I don’t know if you remember me. We - we met at Christmas.”

“Brock? Oh. Jack’s friend from work. What…?”

“It’s about Jack,” he says, but trails off. He can’t bring himself to finish that sentence, because suddenly, the man trapped in that car isn’t _Rollins_ anymore - not his coworker, not a guy on his team. It’s _Jack_ , a person he knows, a person he cares about, and he’s calling that person’s mother at two o’clock in the morning to tell her to get on the next flight to San Antonio, because this might be her last chance to talk to her son.

“What’s going on?” she asks, sounding wide awake now. “Is he okay? What happened?”

“He’s...There was an accident. We were just outside San Antonio on assignment and he - he got hurt. Car accident. We’ve got an extrication team trying to get him out now.”

Now she falls silent.

“I’m sorry.”

“How bad is it?” she asks.

Rumlow hesitates. “You should get on the first flight here if you can.”

Letting out a long, unsteady breath, Margaret says, “Okay. Okay. I’ll be there.”

“Do you have a cell-phone?” Rumlow asks.

“Yes.”

“Call me. When you get here. I’ll come pick you up.”

“Okay,” she says, and her voice is breaking now. “Thank you.”

“I’ll see you at the airport.”

 

Then comes the waiting.

Rumlow waits for an hour for the extrication crew to stabilize the car and cut enough away that, finally, at 3:14, a medic can strap Rollins into a cervical collar and KED before pulling him out. They tell Rumlow that he’s lost consciousness again, tell him the name of the hospital they’re taking him to, and then they load him into the ambulance.

He waits for the team to clean up the scene. They load the target’s body into one of the vans, dispose of everything small enough to fit into the thick, black plastic bags they carry for this sort of thing, and then scrub the blood from the cars and pavement. Two trucks tow the squad car and SUV away. They’ll be taken to a SHIELD facility to be stripped and disposed of. When everything’s been double-checked, he sends the team back to the hotel to get some sleep with a promise to keep them updated on Rollins’ condition and takes one of the unmarked cars to Southwest General.

He waits in line in the emergency room, flashes his badge and waits for the receptionist to check the system for Rollins’ information, waits for a nurse to come out and talk to him. Rollins is in surgery. Even if he survives, he could have brain or nerve damage. He might be blind.

Rumlow waits in a little room near the OR. After three hours, the sun is starting to rise and another nurse comes in.

“Are you Brock?” she asks.

She looks anxious. She has bad news, he knows it, and he doesn’t want to hear it, but in spite of that, he says, “Yeah.”

“I’m Linda. What’s your relationship to Jack?”

“I’m his partner,” he says.

“Alright. Well, he suffered a lot of trauma in the accident. He bled into his brain, so the surgeons drained the blood and gave him medicines to reduce the swelling. So far, that’s looking good. There were twenty-six fractures in his facial bones, so what the surgeons are doing now is inserting titanium plates and wire mesh into all of those bones to put them back together. He’s also getting two plates in his knee. After surgery, we’ll move him to the ICU until we’re sure he’s stable. Do you have any questions for me?”

“The other nurse said something about brain damage?” Rumlow asks.

“We won’t know until he’s recovered from surgery, but it’s likely given the level of trauma and the size of the bleed.”

“Okay,” says Rumlow, squeezing his hands together. “How long will that be?”

“He’ll be in surgery for another four to six hours, and recovery for two. After that, he might wake up, or he might not. It really just depends on how much damage there is and how well he responds to treatment.”

_Jack might not wake up._

Rumlow nods. He has a thousand more questions, but he doesn’t want to keep Linda any longer, especially since it seems like she doesn’t really have any answers herself. Everything is up in the air.

 _Jack might not wake up_.

He rests his elbows on his knees and stares into the blue carpet like it might tell him what to do. The sound of the clock on the wall is deafening in the silence, and his eyes are burning. He needs to write up a report. Normally, he and Rollins would each write one. He’ll have to assign someone else to do the secondary report now. Anderson or Helms. Margaret will be landing in a few hours; he’ll call them before he picks her up. Make sure someone’s informed HQ about the accident.

Now there’s nothing to do but keep waiting.

He leans against the armrest of the couch and stares at the clock.

_Jack might not wake up._


	3. Chapter 3

His ringtone jolts him awake. He gropes around at his pockets, his back and neck protesting stiffly as he sits up and pulls the phone out. It’s 10:45AM, and someone has wrapped a blanket around him. The number on the screen is one he doesn’t recognize.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Brock? It’s Margaret.”

“Hey,” he says. “Are you at the airport?”

“Yes. How is Jack?”

“Still in surgery, I think. I dozed off, but the nurse talked to me around seven. Uh...he had a bleed in his brain, but they fixed it. A lot of broken bones. She said he could be out between eleven and one, two hours in recovery, and then the ICU. They don’t really know how - how much brain damage he’s going to have, so…”

“Brain damage. Jesus…”

Rumlow hears himself say, “He’s gonna be okay,” but he doesn’t believe it.

 

In the car on the way to the airport, Rumlow calls Anderson and tells him to write the secondary mission report. Helms had checked in with HQ as soon as they got back to the hotel. They’re all being allowed to stay for another night. Everyone on the team has to submit to a psych eval when they return to Washington.

When he finally parks at the airport, he wishes that he had changed clothes. He’s still in his blacks. It doesn’t seem appropriate. Margaret is supposed to meet him in the Starbucks, so he finds it on the terminal map and makes his way there. She’s sitting at a two-seater table, looking out the window onto the tarmac. She’s a tall, broad woman with long salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in a sharp beige blouse tucked into high-waisted black trousers. Rumlow had remembered her as intimidating, but she looked more vulnerable now, nursing her coffee through lips tightened with worry. She stands as soon as she notices him and throws her empty cup into the can near the table.

“Good to see you again,” he says as he takes her suitcase. “I wish the circumstances were different.”

God, he sounds like an agent delivering a condolence, but he doesn’t know what to say, how to sound genuine. She nods curtly and he leads her through the terminal back to the car without another word.

As they pull back onto the highway, she finally breaches the silence.

“If I ask you a question, will you be honest with me?”

Rumlow glances over at her. She’s looking straight ahead, hands folded over the handle of her purse.

“Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”

“Are you and Jack in a relationship?”

The question hits Rumlow right in the gut.

“No,” he says with the practiced tone of someone who has been through more than one interrogation. Strictly speaking, it’s not a lie. “Why would you think that?”

“He brought you to Christmas,” she says. “And now you’re the one staying with him in the hospital. Picking me up from the airport.”

“We’re friends. And this was my op. I had a guy go down. I’d be there for any of them.”

She sighs, seemingly relieved.

Rumlow doesn’t know her very well. He knows that she’s at least somewhat religious, that she prays before meals, that she caught Rollins fooling around with a classmate when he was seventeen and sent him to therapy. He knows it would be a mistake not to deny it.

There was something between them, but they’d never called it a relationship. They’d never called it anything, exactly. It just was something they did and didn’t talk about, something that had escalated, so slowly that both of them had barely noticed, from jerking each other off on long assignments, to whatever it was now. Off-duty nights at one of their apartments, falling asleep on each other’s shoulders in front of the TV, and making meals together, and going out to dinner, and sitting in their underwear in comfortable silence while they finished their mission reports, and laying in bed staring up at the ceiling, talking until they fell asleep, and each trusting the other to have his back, no matter what, more than anyone else on the team, and Rollins turning down a promotion, maybe not because having his own unit would mean Rumlow wasn’t in it, but he turned it down all the same, and Rumlow being _happy_ that he had turned it down, and having casual sex, except was it really casual if neither of them had done it with anyone else in the last five years? Did it have to mean something that Rumlow could count on one hand the number of times they’d slept apart in the last six months? And now _this_ , this panicked, aching, desperate feeling. Rumlow’s lost men before. He’s lost friends. This is different.

 

Rumlow drops Margaret off at the entrance with directions to the waiting room nearest to the OR, then pulls the car around and parks in the lot. As he makes his way toward the waiting room, he can hear Margaret’s raised voice down the hall.

“I’m his mother!” she shouts, her voice pitched high with anger. “I have the right to make decisions--”

“I understand that you’re frustrated,” another voice. Linda, the nurse from last night. Rumlow rounds the corner to see Margaret  towering over Linda, fists clenched tight at her sides. “But we have to consider the patient’s wishes--”

“What the hell is going on?!” Rumlow asks. Margaret looks like she might start swinging any second. He puts as much of himself between the two women as he can, and she takes a step back.

“This woman was just informing me,” she says through gritted teeth, “that SHIELD faxed over Jack’s power of attorney forms, and you’re listed as his only proxy. I tried to explain that you aren’t related to Jack, but apparently this hospital’s _policy_ is to treat _same-sex partners_ as if they were married.”

_Partner_. He had told Linda that he was Rollins’ partner.

_Shit_.


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a shorter chapter. I struggled with where to end this one, but this felt like the right place, so chapter five will likely be a bit on the long side.

Rumlow and Margaret sit on opposite ends of the waiting room. They don’t speak. It’s two o’clock when Linda comes back to tell them that Rollins is in recovery. Stable. The surgery went well. Just a matter of time until they know the extent of the damage. For the first time, she talks possible outcomes, lowers expectations. The most likely scenario is that he wakes up in a few hours, but he’s profoundly disabled. Cognitive deficits. Blindness. Seizures. Loss of bowel or bladder control. All of which might get better with time, but are likely permanent. There’s a slim chance he’s already gone and they just don’t know it. Brain death. Coma. Vegetative State. She doesn’t even put a full return to normal on the table.

A few minutes after she leaves, the surgeon, Dr. Barrera, comes in to talk to them. Gives more specifics on what’s to come. There are a lot of “ifs”. At least two weeks until he’s discharged. After that, the danger of his condition worsening drops, and he can be moved to a facility closer to home. Intensive rehabilitation or long-term care, depending on how much cognitive function he has when he wakes up. He tells them to start thinking about who would be his primary care-giver.

As soon as Barrera clears the room, Margaret says, “You’re going to keep him in Washington with you.”

“No,” says Rumlow, shaking his head. He wants to. He really does, but it doesn’t make sense. “I’m gone a lot for work, and that’s a seven-hour drive for you. We’ll find somewhere in Boston. I’ll ask for a transfer so I can help out more, but…You’re his mom. He should be with you.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m gonna check in with my guys. I said I’d let them know when he was out of surgery.”

Margaret nods, and Rumlow walks out into the hall, pulls out his phone, and dials Anderson.

“Hello?”

“Hey. Rollins is in recovery. They’re gonna move him to the ICU in a couple hours, if you guys want to- to come see him.”

“Aren’t ICUs usually immediate family only?”

“Yeah, well, I’ll talk to his mom. You guys can be his siblings. I mean, Tenet, Dulles, and Takeshi are gonna have to be adopted, but we’ll make it work.” 

Anderson snorts. “Yeah, we’ll be there. Any idea when he gets to go home?”

“Two weeks, but he’s not going back to Washington. He’s, uh...they’re gonna move him to Boston. His mom lives there, so…”

“Mmh.”

The line goes silent for so long that Rumlow thinks the call must have dropped, but finally, Anderson speaks again.

“He’s not coming back to work, is he?”

“No,” Rumlow manages to choke out. “Probably not.”

Anderson exhales sharply. “That fucking sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna write me up if I beat the shit out of Gates?”

Rumlow sighs. “Don’t. It wasn’t his fault. Not really. Just a bad situation. I gotta go.”

“Alright. See you in a few hours.”

 

Visiting hours for the ICU are in half-hour blocks, five times a day, so Rollins is out of recovery for an hour before they’re allowed to go up. A nurse leads them to the ICU, showing them the waiting room along the way. The unit smells different than the rest of the hospital - harsh, sickly, antiseptic. It’s quiet, apart from the constant, low sounds of machinery. 

Rollins’ room is toward the back, and as soon as Rumlow sets foot over the threshold, all of the air rushes out of his lungs in a single burst. He’s still unconscious, face bruised, swollen and stitched, bandages all around his head. His left leg is propped up in a cast. 

Margaret covers her mouth, stifling a little gasp, and turns away for a second before she takes a deep breath and sinks into the chair next to Rollins’ bed. Rumlow wants to give her time, so he stays by the door, hands folded in front of him. He can’t bring himself to look at Rollins anymore, not like that. He stares down at the linoleum, instead.

“Brock?” Margaret asks softly. He meets her eyes reluctantly, and she swallows hard. “Will you pray with me?”

The question throws him for a loop so much that he almost doesn’t respond. He’s not particularly religious, and he can’t recall the last time he prayed - probably when he was a kid - but refusing wouldn’t do anything other than maybe alienate Margaret, make her just that little bit more convinced that Rumlow’s somehow bad for her son. He nods, and walks over to sit beside the bed, taking Margaret’s outstretched hand.

“Lord God, we lift Jack up to you,” she begins. Rumlow doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to close his eyes or not, so he settles for lowering them, studying the texture of the hospital blanket. “We ask that ask that you bless him as he recuperates from surgery. We pray for a fast recovery, free from complications. Please grant him the graces he needs, and provide for his temporal and spiritual needs. Bless his doctors, nurses, and caregivers so that they may be true instruments of Your healing power here on earth as they treat him. We also ask, Lord God, that You grant him peace, calm, and a steadfast faith in Your infinite mercy as he recovers and recuperates. All these we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, our Divine physician, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Amen.”

“Amen.”


End file.
